Metagaming

Achievements — system-level awards for certain game­play goals — are explicit metagames. Many players find that they are substantially less rewarding than the metagames they create for themselves.

After all, part of the fun of a meta-game is not know­ing if it’s even technically possible to accomplish your goal.

It’s “Jump the van over the river: 30 points” vs. “Can I get this beat-up van with a popped tire to go fast enough to jump over that river? Let’s find out!” One is follow ing instructions, the other is invention.

— Sleepover, San Francisco (via marco)

Rumors Of An Apple Affiliate Platform

I was pleased to hear the circulating rumor that Apple will announce a powerful affiliate platform on its January 27th press conference. Perhaps this platform will be not just for marketing, but also for selling items directly. And since these sales will likely lead to paid content downloads in a seamless real-time experience, it has the makings of yet another Cupertino game-changer.

Sure, there is already an iTunes affiliate marketing program, just like there’s already a popular affiliate marketing program for Amazon’s web-based store.

But these affiliate marketing models have more or less remained the same for the last 10 years. I think it’s about time for a change.

The Platform Opportunity

A new market is going to soon pop out of thin air, just like it did in 2008 with the iPhone. And just like in 2008, there’ll be a market vacuum. One of the new questions many people will be asking themselves is “how can I get good stuff for my tablet?”

This new question is a big opportunity for developers such as myself (and presumably, as the analytics suggest, my readers.) Of course, there will be an official store, just as there is now. And certainly the iPhone App Store and iTunes are both a pleasure to visit. As is Amazon.com. And owning the store itself is the simplest, most obvious way for Apple and Amazon to both control the user experience and generate revenue from a cloud-based content platform.

And yet, these stores must always be one-size-fits-all, and that’s not enough for me. “Pants on the Ground” would not have happened if Apple had some devious way of controlling all the internet memes through its own official gateway. And neither would Ushahidi. Yes, “the wisdom of the crowds” may be so very 2006, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

The Example of Local News

iTunes has done a phenomenal job getting high-quality educational podcasts into the iTunes store. But YouTube EDU also has fantastic content, and so does does Academic Earth. And I don’t doubt for a second that publications like the New York Times would fit very well into the iTunes model, and perhaps even farther down the long tail. It works great for music, after all. Why not for news?

Because news, in our age, proliferates in mysterious ways. If you look at the process of selling news as a funnel, it is complex and individualized. I suspect that people will never again all go to one place to find (and buy) their news, and that there’ll never be another Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

Medill and NYU and Berkman and CUNY and Columbia and heaps of others have all drastically overhauled their curriculum to confront this sea change. In a new post titled “Information Finds a Way, but Does Revenue?”, David Cohn does a great job of encapsulating t

In this age of experimentation, which we all agree is happening, there are certain assumptions we make that steer the direction of our thought.

One of those assumptions, and I claim this all the time, is that there will always be a market for news and information. That marketplace is in flux and hard to pin down at the moment, but people want accurate and thorough news and information. If this assumption is true, then journalism will be sustainable once we figure out the marketplace again and how to “sell” the news.

I don’t claim to have all the answers about how to solve this problem. But I do have a couple potential answers I’d like to try out. And if there was a simple, extensible affiliate platform that could be woven into the fabric of the web, 10,000 other developers and myself could all experiment and iterate and compete and come up with some great vertical, highly-contextualized ways to sell different kinds of news in different circumstances to different kinds of customers.

I’ll end this post by calling out one of the few people who really may be in the position to influence the course of events, fellow Berkeley resident Dave Winer. Dave recently announced that he’s going to teach at NYU and he’s involved in a secretive NYC-based journalism project:

NYU and Manhattan are going to be very interesting places in the coming months and years, in exactly the areas I’m interested in. There are projects getting underway that I can’t talk about yet, but when you hear about them you’ll probably understand why I had to go.

I don’t know anything about the project he speaks of, but if it involves a platform - and if it’s Dave it almost definitely does - I doubt that it has anything to do with the part of actually selling content and subscriptions. The platform is probably related to distributed microblogging of some kind, and it’ll probably be wonderful for what it does.

[ Update: Judging by the Rebooting the News essay Dave posted this morning, it seems like the project relates to user-generated-advertising. I can see why he’s so excited about it, as it really is a fantastic idea. ]

But will this project help local news organizations find a sustainable business model? Given the conversations I frequently have with colleagues working in world-class newsrooms, and especially given the desperate, grasping-at-straws vibe Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seems to give off , I don’t have an excess of confidence.

But this new Apple affiliate platform launch rumor is vindicating. I eagerly await the chance to try it out.

PR vs. CYA

Any organization in the business of certification runs into the problem of having to market the reliability of certification while also covering their bums.

Google’s Qualified Developer Directory

Google just released a new directory for its Qualified Developer program.

This program has been public since last year, but it’s only recently been marketed. A message marketing the program popped into my inbox a couple weeks ago:

Dear Developer, Congratulations on your acceptance into the Google Qualified Gadget Ads Expert program! This program is designed for professionals who are currently developing Gadget Ads. This qualification can provide credibility and help promote your development expertise in Gadget Ads.

For more details on the program, please visit http://code.google.com/qualify/

Achieving and maintaining qualification consist of acquiring points in four areas:

1. Your references

2. Active development examples

3. Community participation

4. Qualification exams

It’s pretty obvious why Google is interested in having a stronger presence in developer certification. They want to make sure that its easier for skilled developers - skilled particularly in Google APIs - to get jobs, because what’s good for the internet job market and internet web application usability is good for Google.

But it’s more illuminative to look at what specific APIs and platforms Google is offering for certification. They’re clearly encouraging qualification for Adsense Gadgets, which are like customizable interactive widgets that usually helps increase CTRs.

I have a hunch - just a wild guess - that the new Developer Directory will get high rankings for any relevant searches, and that Google has a big, shiny, and probably fully achievable vision for their Qualification program. It’s certainly exciting to think of the possibilities. I actually think that Stack Overflow Careers is eating Google’s lunch (with money salad on the menu) as far as useful recruitment data is concerned. Crowdsourced peer validation is tots malots the best form of certification.

But to get back to the point of this post, there’s a conflict that comes up with certification programs of this nature. As usual, HN commenters wittily and succinctly addressed the issue in the discussion thread for the new directory site:

“Qualified Developers are thoroughly vetted by Google … and meet rigorous qualification standards.”

Followed three lines later by…

“Google does not make any representation, endorsement or warranty regarding the services of these developers.”

These statements seem at odds with each other.

Skill certification is one of the more obvious areas where this conflict arises, but it appears surprisingly often. Safety products or products that are potentially dangerous are another example of marketing making strong, unequivocal promises (Our bungee jumps are safe, tots malots) while legally dodging responsibility (If our bungee jumps kill you, your family can’t sue us because we’re warning you that our bungee jumps suck. Caveat emptor, bitch. )

Healthcare and medical services and products also fall into this category, and it’s the area where the PR/CYA paradox is at its most frustrating, as medical malpractice lawsuits have helped aggravate the status quo of draconian healthcare policy.

Can you think of any other product spaces where the legalese and marketing aren’t allowed within a 100 mile radius of each other?

Location Based Networks: Fighting Over the Same Audience and Living On Borrowed Time

dbreunig:

One of these days, location based networks are going to wake up and realize their numbers and games are meaningless once Google or Facebook flips a switch. So far all of these companies keep targeting the early adopter, game-loving, geek crowd. People that will trade privacy for a mayorship.

Until these companies create a product that provides a real value to a niche, active audience, they’re living on borrowed time. The early adopter geek will jump ship for Google in a heartbeat.

Any of the following audiences would love a specialized service. Pick one and build your company. Hell, build it on top of Twitter. You’d be spending almost nothing and devoting most of your time to designing features within the interface:

• Bicyclists
• Interior designers
• Foodies
• College kids
• Truck drivers/delivery men
• Skiers
• etc.

The Google.cn Decision Is Not About IP

Journey To The West

Drewbot on Google & China

The excuse given for their previous censorship efforts was that Google plans to adhere to ‘local laws.’ This sidestepped the issue and ignored the big question: do these local laws harm or impede people or their rights.

Only now, when their own intellectual property is threatened, do they act. The fact that Google actively champions itself as the leader of an “Open Source” movement makes this story all the more ironic.

I don’t believe for a second that this really, truly has to do with IP. My own experience with Google as an organization is that it strives to practice its mantra of “Don’t Be Evil”, and as compliance with states like China has shown, sometimes not being evil is tricky indeed.

Google didn’t have to do this. They didn’t have to walk away from many millions of impressionable (pun intended) Chinese people. But they did. And that’s why this is indeed a huge story, with extraordinary possible ramifications of historical scale. The original post used the phrase “we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities”. I wouldn’t be surprised if these authorities consulted went as high up in the authority chain as the Secretary of State.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about this subject to speak at length without turning into a talking asshole, but I do have one point that I believe should be raised.

Was this brute force attack carried out by the Chinese government? I’m sure there’s a good chance it was. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was done by savvy dissidents engaging in the Art of War. Perhaps even Google itself, providing itself with an excuse for shareholders and a better position for future negotiations with the Chinese government.

Outside of such groundless speculation, I am resigned to watch this develop, and I’ll be excited to see where it goes from here. Hopefully in a progressive direction, because as Drewbot wrote in his post, “the only losers in this debacle are the Chinese people.”

At the very least, this incident gives us a better subject of collective sympathy than Conan O’Brien.

Update: My speculation was indeed groundless. The Hacker News discussion has come up with a lot of great links and facts about what appears to a be a massive coordinated attack on “the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical”.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

I had the chance today to catch up on some reading I had queued up, and I found Tahdg Kelly’s thoughts on Zynga from a couple weeks ago to be a surprisingly validating read.

Zynga’s coffers are deep, as are Playdom and Playfish’s, but at the heart of their model are some deep weaknesses that are going to let a lot of the air out of their Fast Food business models. The audience expectations are going to shift, the key factors enabling the business model likewise, and while it’s been a great short term success this year, viral gaming doesn’t seem to have any more easy wins left.

Now comes the hard part. Diversification, experimentation and deep design breeding interesting ideas do not grow on trees and companies need to commit to them to see them through. Right now that’s not the Zynga way.

Twelve months from now it will be the companies that have managed to diversify, build strong followings and create real value that will be the new darlings of the scene. Those that do not adapt will still be there but their story will be one of difficulty. As social games come to the end of their beginning, Zynga is increasingly look like an Atari-era publisher leading the charge but unlikely to capitalise in the longer term because they’re too busy thinking they’re in the burger business.

It’s easy to doubt your focus on building rich, meticulously designed products when developing social games these days.

Thank goodness people like Tahdg (and Jason Fried) are there to remind us that the best long position to take is in creating relationships that last.

The Rules of the Game

A fantastic Rands in Repose post called Gaming the System published last week is all about making a game out of otherwise mundane jobs like bug tracking. But much of the advice given is also relevant to the design of actual games as well as applications intending to offer an incremental learning curve inspired by game design.

The entire post is well worth reading. One of my takeaways from it is that a game is a contract. The rules of this contract can be changed - carefully and transparently - but should never be broken.

Here’s a few of my favorite quotes from the post:

Geeks will furiously work to uncover the rules of a game and then use those rules to determine how they might win. But the actual discovery of how to win is a buzz kill. The thrill, the adrenalin, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game you can’t let them win, even though that’s exactly what they think they want.

In the defense of game designers, there are no quests that read “Go waste sixteen hours of your life doing nothing”. They are more elegant with their descriptions; they splice all sorts of different tasks together to distract you from the dull inanity of large, laborious tasks. But they know that part of what makes us tick is the micro-pleasure we get from obsessively scratching the task itch in pursuit of the achievement.

In an interconnected world, games became social, and once we discovered each other in these virtual worlds, we looked for a means to compare our feats. We began to understand that achievement was not just becoming great at a game, but being recognized for being great.

Enforce rules with an iron fist. A rule not followed is twice as bad as a poorly defined one. A violation of the rules is an affront to a geek. They react violently to violations of the rules because it’s an indication that the system is not working. Rules make a game fair, and when they stop being followed, the geeks stop playing.